Earticle

초록

영어

In March 2018, the Korean government introduced the revised Labor Standards Act, with a 52-hour per week cap (hereafter, 52-hour workweek policy) that reduces the maximum working hours per week by 52 hours from the previous 68 hours. Using this event, this study analyzed impacts of work hour reduction on employment and labor productivity with the Difference-in-differences (DiD) method. As the policy was in advance implemented to the sub-group of the firms with employees more than 300, we can divide our sample into the treatment group and the control group and then apply the DiD method. In particular, to increase comparability, we restrict our sample into the firms with employees greater than 100 and less than 500. We also test robustness of our results with various restriction ranges for the number of employees. Results show that after introduction of the 52-hour workweek policy, the treatment group increased their employees by 5.36% more than the control group. Moreover, this increment was driven not by non-regular workers but by regular workers. It suggests that there was a job sharing effect, which is one of the objectives of the policy. The evidence is consistent with the result of Il-Ho Song(2004), which showed that reduction of working hours increases employment in a short-term period. On the other hand, however, no evidence was found for positive or negative impacts on labor productivity. It is contrast to the concern raised by employers, which is that work hour reduction damages firm performance as labor productivity would be diminished. Overall, our finding shows that the 52-hour workweek policy was successful in terms of employment and labor productivity. It increased job opportunities without loss of labor productivity. As this policy will be applied to the firms with smaller sizes in the upcoming years, this study contributes to the government by providing a foundation to predict the impacts of this policy. However, the evidence reported in this paper should be carefully used for the prediction, because smaller firms may have difficulties to reduce labor force due to decreased work hours and then experience diminishing labor productivity. When the policy is implemented to all national firms in Korea regardless of firm size, future study will be requested to understand a whole picture of the impacts of the 52-house workweek policy.

목차

Ⅰ. 서론
Ⅱ. 기존연구의 검토
Ⅲ. 연구 방법
Ⅳ. 분석 결과
Ⅴ. 결론 및 토론
참고문헌
Abstract

키워드

저자

• 심재선 [ Jae-sun Shim | 서울과학종합대학원 박사과정 ] 제1저자
• 김호현 [ Hohyun Kim | 서울과학종합대학원 특임교수 ] 교신저자

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  생산성연구: 국제융합학술지 [Productivity Research: An International Interdisciplinary Journal]

• 간기

  격월간

• pISSN

  1225-3553

• 수록기간

  1987~2025

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 325 DDC 330